Death's Mistress (Dorina Basarab, #2)(2)

Of course, we’d both come a long way from our inauspicious beginnings. These days, he went by the name of Hugo Vleck and operated a successful club when he wasn’t selling illegal fey narcotics. And as for me . . . Well, I solve problems of the vampire kind, and Vleck was making my employer very unhappy. My job was to cheer him up. The fact that I was going to enjoy it was just a bonus.

The crowd was five thick around the bar, but we didn’t have any trouble getting served. That wasn’t too surprising since my date owned the club, but he shot me a look over his shoulder, checking to see if I was suitably impressed. I smiled and he put a hand on my ass.

“Cristal for the lady,” he told the young vamp bartender, giving me a little squeeze.

“Will you be drinking, too, sir?”

Vleck grinned, showing off his fangs. “Later.”

He and the bartender exchanged a look, while I tried to appear like someone who didn’t know that a lot of vamps prefer their alcohol straight from a victim’s veins. They say it increases the high they get from feeding, and is the only way to feel the burn with their metabolism. Vleck was clearly calculating how much more it would take to get me all the way to drunk. I could have told him there wasn’t that much booze in the world, but why spoil his evening?

He had so little of it left.

The bartender sat a champagne flute on the bar but Vleck shook his head. “I’ll take the bottle. Wrap it up.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“My place. It isn’t far.”

Wow. He must really plan to get nasty. I draped an arm around his waist, and rested my chin on his shoulder. “I don’t feel like waiting. Isn’t there somewhere we could go here?”

“Naw. The office is too small—you can barely turn around in that thing.”

“So? You’re the boss. Make some space,” I said, smiling seductively and pulling him away from the bar. Like with most crappy clubs, the bathrooms were down a dark hallway. I dragged him into the men’s room and tugged his shirt off.

He chuckled and disengaged long enough to haul a couple of guys out of a stall and throw them out the door, one with his trousers still around his knees. I leaned against a sink while he instructed one of the vamps acting as bouncers to tell everyone that the facilities were out of order. Then he turned and grabbed me by the waistband.

“Let’s see what you got.”

“Thought you’d never ask.” I smiled and shut the door with my foot.

Five minutes later, I emerged, a little out of breath but not too bad, all things considered.

The bouncer caught my eye on the way out. He seemed surprised, maybe because I was still alive. But then he grinned. “Have fun?”

“Loved him to pieces.”

I stopped by vamp central, aka the East Coast Office of the North American Vampire Senate, to get my check. The vamps usually took care of fungus like Vleck themselves, holding each master responsible for his own servants’ behavior. But the system wasn’t as perfect as they liked people to believe.

Vampires could be emancipated from their masters’ control when they reached a certain power level, freeing them from forced obedience. Others were under the control of senior-level masters on other Senates, who didn’t always care about the rules laid down by their North American counterpart. And then there were the revenants, who had had something go wrong in the Change, and ended up answering to nobody but their own twisted minds.

When any of these types started causing trouble, the Senate stepped in. And luckily for me, the current war in the supernatural community had stretched their resources. It had gotten so bad lately that they were even willing to employ a dhampir—that hated cross between a vampire and a human—on the cleanup crew. But I always got the impression that they disinfected the office after I left.

The elevator opened onto a scene of old-world elegance. Shiny cherrywood pillars surrounded a polished table set with exotic flowers, dappled by the light of an exquisite crystal chandelier. Underfoot, an inlaid marble floor in a sunburst pattern in warm shades of gold and amber anchored the scene. It would have been an attractive room, if not for the strokes of too-white meanness propping up the walls.

One of them peeled off to block my path. Waspish and fine-boned, he was wearing a close-fitting coat and knee pants of midnight blue velvet and heels an inch higher than mine. His long, pin-straight blond hair was pulled back into a queue, and he had an honest-to-God cravat. He looked like he’d stepped out of a period movie—the kind where they don’t stint on the costumes—and his expression said he smelled something bad.

“Who let you in?” he demanded.

Every time they changed the guards, it was the same story. And it was always worse with the older ones. They recalled the good old days when dhampirs were killed on sight, preferably slowly. Their attitude pissed me off, considering that I’d been working here for over a month now, and the nightclub scene had left me spoiling for a fight. Vleck hadn’t been nearly enough of a challenge.

But damn it, I’d promised a certain someone to be on my best behavior. “I’m here to see Mircea,” I told him, instead of punching the vamp through the pretty brocaded wallpaper.

“Lord Mircea.”

“Whatever. I have a delivery,” I said, pushing past.

And found my arm seized in a bruising grip. “You can wait in the alley with the rest of the garbage until sent for.”